Tuesday, March 06, 2007

The Libby Case Ends in Guilty Verdict

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and the Aspens in the West

A feather in the cap for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury's verdict -- guilty on four counts out of five -- leaves no doubts that it was Fitzgerald's masterful summation that persuaded the jurors to make their decision.

No matter how they spin it, the verdict is a blot on Vice President Cheney, that he was deeply involved in smearing former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his disclosure about fictitious claim by the Bush Administration that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger. Libby is taking the fall but Vice President Cheney played a major role in going after Ambassador Wilson and disclosure of the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer. The facts raise questions about the role of the White House. Another example of how far the president and his aides were prepared to go to justify the war -- the war that has become like a ball of fat stuck in the president's throat.

Libby has hidden talents. In a letter to the former NY Times reporter Judith Miller, who was serving a sentence in prison for refusing to testify, Libby wrote: “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life,”. Poetic. He could use his time in prison to write about the aspens and such things or scatological erotica. See Scooter's Sex Shocker, The New Yorker Nov.7,2005.

A federal jury today convicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of lying about his role in the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity, finding the vice president's former chief of staff guilty of two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, while acquitting him of single count of lying to the FBI.

The verdict, reached by the 11 jurors on the 10th day of deliberations, culminated the seven-week trial of the highest-ranking White House official to be indicted on criminal charges in modern times.

Under federal sentencing guidlines, Libby faces a probable prison term of 1 1/2 to three years when he is sentenced by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton June 5